Usually the term "imposter" in sims context refers to the low-resolution representation of the lot and its objects when in hood screen or when seeing the neighbour from next door. You usually get a fresh one made when you change something in the lot. I don't know what the term metadata means though or how it relates or modifies the term "imposter"

OK, well I might be able to answer that. Metadata is high level information about data. Metadata takes data and changes it into information.

For example, the data might be "Mootilda". The metadata could be "Person looking after the LotExpander". Or, the metadata could be "Name of the Gateway Computers mascott".

Take data of "6". Metadata is "The maximum size of a Sims 2 lot, in neighborhood tiles". Or perhaps, "The age of my cat".

Does that make any sense? Data means nothing to us without the metadata. Modding can be a process of determining which metadata to associate with the data in the various packages.

The online dictionaries aren't much help. Here's my favorite definition, so far:

From Encarta:
"descriptive statistical information about the elements of a set of data"

Ah, leave it to the Wikipedia:
"Metadata is used to facilitate the understanding, use and management of data."

That's a pretty good definition.

So maybe the description would have made more sense as "imposter metadata" rather than "metadata imposter"?

Here's my guess:

The MOBJT record contains metdata about objects. The XOBJ and OBJT records contain the actual objects. However, the MOBJT record doesn't try to point to each instance of each object. Instead, it has a reference number (imposter) which "fills in" for the object instances.

The OBJM record is just a list of all instances for each reference number. Hence, it takes the metadata imposter (reference number) and converts it into actual object instances.

I disagree. I believe that shrinking and row houses are two completely different topics, which may or may not be related.

It's easy to see how shrinking a lot may have nothing to do with row houses - for example, getting rid of the old road on a rotated lot, or shrinking a lot on one side and expanding it on the other to shift the house on the lot.

But we don't know how to implement row houses. Right now, we have two completely unrelated methods: overlapping of lots and shrinking of lots. niol's working on a technique which includes overlapping of irregularly sized lots. We may yet find some flag which allows us to unlock the unbuildable tiles, so that no shrinking is required. There may even be some as-yet-undreamed-of way to make row houses.

for OBJM ,
I wonder how to interpret it. I kinda guess it may list out the numeric replacement for an object, an object state, an object recolour, etc?

Has that to do with the data's relative position in a given array?


lol, I got the same confusion the first time I tried to figure out the coordinates for the portals.
lol, may use the zero highlighting to ease the searching process... This has become one of my often-do act in the SimPE hex view.

As for the thread headings,

there're some categorisable, then why not let them be?
As for those can't be, they can be in the misc. whether they're are completely a separate topic or a title relating to >1 topics.

Surely, there can be some barely categorisable in the beginning while some may be re-categorised afterwards. The category part(s) of the titles may change. There can be some threads may split or merge also.

But at least, there're some that can be more easily sorted out.

I'm not expecting purity here.


How can we simulate or make lots corrupted intentionally...?


Mutantbunny,

I guess you mean the flow of the interaction may be missed out unless the poster is aware and honest enough to tell why they reach those points when based on the other threads.

Probably adding post links continuously to the topic-specific threads can also work out in that way of thinking. Lol, I tend to believe both ways go .


Mootilda,

Are you included? :P

The 'extra' portals on the EA lot I found before is just an oddity: the car entry portal must be marked with 'keep buying' while the other portals are not. Inge, could the buyable portal you made be overriding the EA original and cause this?

I have placed a BV Twikkii Island beach lot on my hood--and it crashed upon trying to enter. lol. The ONLY crash I've had so far. lol....

I tried the 1xs on all beach terrains I have (not many.) On one terrain the EA 3x5 would place but none of my shrunk lots would. I'm pretty sure this is a function of the slope being too steep on the terrains. My shrunk lots place fine is several other terrains, but the 1xs all result in the blue tear at the water edge. Mootilda, will your smoothing edge feature for the LA smooth the back and front or just the sides?

I don't know what else to try with these. Anyone, any ideas? If not, then I guess I wait until the next version.....

I think of it as a translation table: from the GUID and object description (metadata) in the MOBJT record, to the actual object instances in XOBJ and OBJT.

For the portal logic, the OBJM record allows the LA to find the portals. For all other objects? I don't know. From what Inge says, perhaps the OBJM record is irrelevant?

This seems like a useful feature... I've never tried it before.

May I ask why you would want to intentionally corrupt a lot? The easiest way to intentionally corrupt a lot is to put invalid data into a field. This implies that you know how to parse a record into fields, and that you know which data is valid or invalid. I suppose that changing any byte of data in the lot package could be considered to be "corruption". So, the question is: what are you trying to accomplish?

Yes. Didn't think that I needed to specify myself in the post, but I added myself to the list that I gave Delphy.

This was a maxis-made beach lot that hadn't been touched by the LotAdjuster?

My intention is to smooth all four edges (front, back, 2 sides). However, I'm still getting very odd behavior with the smoothing code which I haven't managed to explain.

No more ideas at this time. Sorry.

Yes. I placed a 3x 5 went in, placed Inge's flamingo and checked the street portals.

Here's all the information that I have on the XOBJ record:

XOBJ - 584F424A - Object Class Dump

80 Bytes - unknown (all zero)
80 = 0x50: Float (single) - X coordinate
84 = 0x54: Float (single) - Y coordinate
16 Bytes - unknown
DWORD - Version
8 DWORDs - unknown
If Version is 12: 2 additional DWORDs - unknown
Byte - Direction (Left = 0, Top = 2; Right = 4, Bottom = 6)

Sorry that this information is so scanty. Obviously, the only things that we know for sure are how to find the location and the direction of the portals.

The direction is the direction of the arrow on the portals, and is dependent upon the U11 value. For example, a portal which points left on a left-facing lot is pointing to the far-side of the road. A portal which points left on a right-facing lot is pointing towards the house from the road.

[Update:] Please see the new improved version of the XOBJ record at:
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1818678

It is overriding the original, that's by design. Can it be causing duplicate portals? Not unless you're buying extra portals - or you could be using the dropper or something

Not the problem then. I think somewhere, must be in the EA file, that item is set to 'keep buying true'. If one picks the portal up to move it, the item continues to be in your hand. The other portals act normally. buy one get one. No big deal anyway, just must be careful when placing not to place more than one.

I'm up to about page 11 looking at the old posts. I think I might start a post listing what I have so far, then it won't have to be repeated from scratch, if I give up or something.

Oh, and nobody explained what a TOC is yet.

OK, i finished the big castle I have been working on, more or less. Here is a pic:

17 buildings total, plus the outer walls.. I have so far play tested the Palace Park, works fine. The middle lots are moved to the center, roads cut off.

And I took a break from the building frenzy and played some of the families in the village, the main hood. Here is a cottage that I orginally built on a small 1x2 lot, (andies), and now first expanded, rebuilt the sides, then shrunk, to make it fit in the row of cottage houses by the village square. Worked like a charm. No crashes, not on 7 pm, not at other times.
Pics:


I also played ANOTHER lot in the village for 5 sim days. Not touched by the Lot Adjuster. It crashes all the time, very annoying. But I can see on the log files, that these crashes are NOT due to the LA - they occur since I installed BV in september, and seems to be connected to certain sims. The log says Access Violation..
I am not sure the log files from that lot crashing would be of any help, but I can upload them if anyone is interested.. I have had similar crashes on other lots, also BEFORE I started to use LA. I thought they were connected to some graphic problem or something, but now I see the log saying ACCESS VIOLATION.

Good idea.

Table of Contents. IE, a list of posts by topic.

OK; understand + agree =).


Something completely different (memory management):

There's one more thing I'd like to test re. shrunk lots crashing (in case I find the time): whether or not I can see any difference when shadows are on or off. In order to get useable results: am I right with the assumption that when I start and quit the game normally, it (or the OS?) will clean up its memory behind itself? So that, if I test a lot that may or may not be corrupt (or: have problems that lead to corruption), and then quit and restart (in order to test the next lot), I can be sure to start from a blank slate? Or do I need to, say, reboot the machine to be sure of that?

TOC:

Ah. Somebody did post that already, but I didn't get the context and wondered what they meant!

There are already 54 posts relating to portals, and I'm only up to page eleven. I don't know that anyone is going to wade through all those posts, even when they can avoid the ones that are not flagged for that topic. It would be better to have some kind of limit on which posts are really informative for a topic - maybe some of you can suggest things once there is a base list of everything.

All of the memory is freed when the game exits. Some of the memory will be correctly re-initialized when you start the game again, some will get whatever values were in the memory before. However, the likelihood of getting the exact same memory locations as the last time that the game ran is exceedingly small. This is all handled by the O/S and the compiler.

As well, when the game starts again, it should reinitialize all of it's own data.

So, I think that it's very safe to assume that no corruption will be passed from one run to another through the memory system.

Hope that answers your question.

This post attempts to put the information on this enormous thread into subheadings, so people can more easily find what they are looking for. Many posts relate to more than one subheading. Some are listed under multiple headings. You may need to look through more than one subheading to find exactly what you want.

The list is under construction; check the 'last edited' field to see where I am up to - beyond that you are on your own.

Here is my list so far -

Posts relating to lot Rotation:
10, 11, 12, 15, 17, 18, 20, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 32, 45, 63, 66, 71, 95, 107, 113, 138, 155, 175, 183, 184, 186, 187, 189, 204, 211, 223, 224, 230, 249, 331, 341, 342 (tutorial), 444, 452, 456, 463, 465, 491, 501,

Posts relating to portals - moving, suitable locations, the revealer... 27, 30, 32-45, 47, 76, 84, 89, 91, 113, 120, 122, 128, 138, 141, 148, 149, 153, 158- 163, 172, 199, 201, 202, 204, 206, 211, 230, 232, 233, 236, 237, 240, 244, 245, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 257, 260-267, 269, 282, 287, 288, 292, 361, 373,396,397,423,439,440,448, 453, 454, 455, 457, 458, 459, 468, 496, 549, 552, 647,

Posts relating to Beach lots:
3, 5, 6, 7, 9, 54, 56- 58, 61, 63, 65, 68, 84, 86, 91, 92, 94, 100, 122, 124, 126, 127, 128, 255, 259, 361, 422, 426, 543, 545, 550, 552-553, 563, 568, 625, 630,

Posts relating to Shrinking:
25, 29, 106, 111, 112, 114, 115, 118, 120, 129, 130, 133, 134, 209, 210, 213, 216, 224, 226, 239, 286, 289, 291, 294, 297, 301, 324, 362, 366, 367, 391, 392, 394,
400-411, 413, 416, 425, 429, 430, 431, 437, 439, 440, 448, 454, 457, 462, 465, 467, 475, 481, 482, 484-489, 492, 496, 498-499, 501, 503, 507, 521-524, 527-533, 535, 537-538, 586-599, 601, 620, 638, 651, 659, 667, 674,


Posts relating to Edge-building (including row houses):
4, 15, 23, 24, 29, 46, 48, 49-52, 55, 103, 105, 130, 134, 165, 166, 167, 289, 295-297, 366, 402, 416, 422, 423, 429, 439, 440, 443, 444, 454, 457, 467, 492,515-516, 527, 538-546, 548-549, 554, 556, 558, 561, 564-565, 574, 586-599, 602, 617,


Posts relating to Larger-than-Maxis lot sizes:
52, 55, 68, 95, 96, 101, 104, 110, 114, 119, 234, 241, 326, 361, 402,


Posts relating to User-Interface and version testing:
62, 78, 90, 151, 154, 274, 292, 298, 302, 303, 306, 307, 309, 310,
311, 314, 317, 318, 327, 338, 370-372, 374-381, 383-391, 394, 395, 397-401, 404, 411, 418, 422, 425, 427, 430, 431, 432, 437-440, 442, 443, 445, 476, 479, 482, 487, 496, 497-500, 503, 507-521, 526-533, 536, 537, 539-543, 551, 557, 561, 570, 575, 579-580, 582, 586-599, 600, 602, 604-615, 617, 619, 627, 629, 631-639, 641, 643, 645-646, 648-651, 655, 658, 660-661, 663-671, 673, 675,


Posts relating to Neighbourhood orientation:
60, 277, 280 456, 480, 491, 501, 581, 639,


Posts relating to neighbourhood terrain alteration, hood roads and roadless lots:
67, 69, 70, 74, 77, 82, 83, 87, 88, 98, 105, 114, 119, 348, 349, 351-353, 402,
404, 405, 408-409, 412-414, 418, 419, 421, 422, 424, 427, 432, 433-437, 442, 445, 456, 458, 459, 461, 464, 469, 471, 472, 474, 480, 481, 483, 486, 562, 565, 571, 577, 579-581, 604-605, 610-616, 619-620, 634, 641-646, 648, 650-652, 654 656-657, 662-663, 671,


Posts relating to terrain smoothing and blue gashes:
94, 99, 100, 122, 123, 293, 294, 391, 405, 414, 415, 419,
421, 427, 428, 432-434, 442, 445, 473, 483, 490, 568,

Posts relating to non-decimal lot sizes:
48, 55, 84, 86, 90, 326, 341, 402, 444, 456, 477, 478,

Posts relating to internal record formats (and other programmer stuff I don't understand - feel free to reclassify):
2, 8, 121, 125, 128, 129, 135, 136, 137, 142, 143, 144, 146, 168, 169, 170, 182, 216, 226, 237, 267, 268, 270, 275, 279, 281, 286-288, 295, 299, 328, 333,
341, 344, 363-365, 414, 422, 458, 460, 470, 534, 573, 569, 622-624, 628,

Thread organisation

555,

I'll add more later.

aelflaed,

maybe, we can highlight or bold the posts we think more informative?

Sure, whatever works. I'm up to page fifteen now.

plasticbox,

may google any freeware to free up the RAM memory...
if you're anal about it.

I'm unsure there're also some to free up the pagefile or system temporary files though. I'm not sure about the MAC. I've not used it for >3 years now.

Surely, if you're extremely cautious, you can shut down the computer for several minutes before the next start.